CURRICULUM BREADTH
Our curriculum is the means by which we achieve our objective of educating children in the knowledge, skills, understanding and behaviours that they will need for their future lives. Its breadth is ‘driven’ by our four curriculum drivers (informed by our values, cultural capital), what we teach and our ambitions for our children.
It includes not only the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum, but also the broad range of extra-curricular activities that the school organises to enrich the children's experience (the wider curriculum) and the 'personal curriculum' (the social rules, attitudes and values which children learn from the way in which they are respected and cared for, the behaviours expected of them and those modelled by adults in school).
Essentials Curriculum
The Chris Quigley Essentials Curriculum forms the framework for National Curriculum subjects.
We define learning as 'a change to long-term memory'
The aims of this curriculum ‘are to ensure that our pupils experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.’ (Chris Quigley)
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CURRICULUM CONCEPTS (Years 1 to 6)
From Years 1 to 6, we use the Chris Quigley 'Essentials' Curriculum as our framework for the delivery of the National Curriculum subjects.
The basic principles of this curriculum are that:
‘Learning is a change to long-term memory, ‘ and that the aims, ‘ are to ensure that our pupils experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.’ (Chris Quigley)
We distinguish between subject topics and threshold concepts. Subject topics are meshed into meaningful schema through threshold concepts – with the same concepts being explored in a wide breadth of topics. In this way, children return to the same concepts over and over again - gradually building understanding of them.
CURRICULUM PROGRESSION (Years 1 to 6)
There are three milestones for each threshold concept. Each of these includes the knowledge pupils that need to understand the threshold concepts. Within each subject children are given opportunities to show their understanding of the threshold concepts.
Children are helped to build strong schemas relating each topic to those previously studied through knowledge webs, shared as knowledge organisers at the beginning of every topic and referred to throughout.
Through each milestone children progress through three cognitive domains- BASIC, ADVANCING AND DEEP. We aim for children to have ’advancing’ understanding (sustained mastery) by the end of a milestone, with some children having greater depth of understanding – ‘deep’ stage.
In recent years there have been great advances in the field of cognitive science and we now know that time is needed for deep learning to take place, rushing through curriculum content results in cognitive overload which limits learning and that basics need to be mastered before children deepen their understanding or become creative thinkers. This takes time – so each milestone takes two years.
